wild rice

Elements of Thanksgiving Meals-Wild Rice

Home Page	(Wild rice harvesting, photo by Frances Densmore, courtesy of the MN Historical Society)
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Wild rice is the only native North American grain, and grows naturally in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and parts of Canada. European settlers learned to harvest and process wild rice from Native Americans. The Native American method of harvesting leaves the plants intact so that immature seeds can ripen and be harvested later. The traditional method of canoe harvesting has given way to cultivated wild rice that is planted in human-made paddies and then harvested by combines. The "wildness" of wild rice was lost when growers developed a strain whose seeds did not shatter at maturity and fall to the gorund. Instead, all of the seeds mature at the same time, which allows wild rice to be harvested more economically. The case of wild rice presents a situation in which one culture adapts a food from another, and in the process changes that food. In this case, Europeans learned Native American methods of harvesting and preparation, and then added their own European technology to incorportate the food into their diet. This case also represents an example of the sacred becoming commodified, in that wild rice had certain cultural and symbolic significance for Native Americans, but as Europeans adapted wild rice to their own culture, they also placed a monetary value on it (Sokolov).